In the same vein as Morality and Custom in Ancient Greece and Courtesans and Fishcakes, except set in Ancient Rome instead of Ancient Athens. Author Paul Chrystal describes a Rome that was more misogynistic than Athens in some ways, less in so in others. Women (except hetaerae, the highest class of courtesan) were non-entities in Athens; they had no property rights and were under the control of a man – father, husband, guardian – their entire lives. Pericles is supposed to have commented that a woman should neither be praised or censured – i.e., never mentioned at all. Roman women did get some public mention – there were a few female poets - and under Augustus a free woman who had born three legitimate children or a freed woman (an ex-slave) who had born four received the right to their own property and to make their own wills. On the other hand, the slightly increased rights came with greatly increased danger; an Athenian man who caught his wife with an adulterer could only kill the man; the woman was not considered sufficiently responsible to resist a seducer. A Roman husband could kill both with impunity (if he chose to be merciful to the man, he had other options – the punishment inherited from the Athenians of burning off the man’s pubic hair and then sodomizing him with radishes, or rape after cutting off the offender’s nose and ears).

This last brings up the Roman attitude toward homosexuality; like the Athenians, Romans didn’t see the division as gay versus straight but active versus passive - those who penetrated and those who were penetrated. The former had full rights; the later did not (there was an exception for men who were raped by enemies in battle). Chrystal notes the Latin word raptus, from which our “rape” is derived, might be more correctly translated as “abduction” and could be consensual; and incestum meant any kind of sexual misbehavior, not necessarily with close relatives.

Chrystal closes with a series of accounts of the sexual lives of the emperors and their relatives – Tiberius and his “minnows”, Nero and his mother, Elagabulus and his reported attempt at gender reassignment surgery, and the Empress Theodora and her trained geese. This last section seems a little out of sync with the rest of the book. I note many of Chrystal’s sources are political enemies of the various people accused of sexual misdeeds; graffiti from Pompeii also figure heavily. If a future archaeologist tried to describe the sex lives of Americans based on graffiti, they might draw erroneous conclusions. (At least as far as I know; maybe all the things I’ve seen depicted in men’s restrooms are actually happening all the time and I’m just missing out).

A plate section with contemporary illustrations; these would be pretty titillating if it were 1960. Endnotes; a very extensive bibliography with both ancient and modern sources. No index, which is a drawback as I couldn’t find some things I wanted to look up. ( )

No se, el tema no me interesaba y era muy detallista. Podría ser bueno para un historiador o un sociologo, no para un simple lector; no es que sea malo, es que es demasiado, ( )